U.S. Case Law documents discuss one or more points of law in a document. Often times, these points of law are not related to each other. A huge body of related documents exists that also discusses individual points of law, such as statutes, treatises, and law review articles.
Traditional research methods require the researcher to specifically search each type of document, or rely on specific references from within a case (to a statute, for example). Traditional document matching methods (known in various search systems as More Like This, Relevance Feedback, Clustering) typically use the entire document, rather than matching based on specific topics within the document. Even when the entire document primarily discusses a single topic, traditional hypertext links are static within a document, rather than being dynamically selected based upon the specific concepts being researched within the document as determined by the search request.
Creating links using terminology from a complete document that has multiple topics does not work well. Links for a specific topic are much more accurate. Even if all links exist in the document, static display of them makes it harder for the researcher to find the links of specific interest to them.
It is to the solution of these and other objects to which the present invention is directed.